“It is really cool that teachers in America can talk to us directly and immediately,” one student said. This semester, Dept. of English has a chance to use distance education classroom, on every Tuesday night in the class of English Conversation, during which a video conference will be held for TKU students to talk to foreign teachers face to face.

Lin Pei-shan (sophomore, Class A, Dept. of Spanish) attends this class as auditor every week and also gets the right to speak during the class. When people ask her why she is willing to attend a class dismissed so late without credit, she answers, “It is very exciting to talk to foreigners through this way.” She adds that the teachers are very patient, and she feels really great in this class.

Every time when class begins, Prof. Wilkinson at the distant end will appear on the monitor and chooses a topic to discuss with the students, such as the food, the school, the most unforgettable thing, etc. And then, students will talk about their opinions or experiences according to the topic. Except Prof. Wilkinson, another female Chinese teacher will be also at the distant end to help the class. She will do the job of formulating the terms, that is, when people of both sides have some terms they cannot explain, she will help translate and coordinate, and students are very satisfied with this way of learning.

Prof. Ai-ling Wang of Dept. of English invited Prof. Wilkinson (Regent University, Virginia, America) to talk to the night school freshmen of Dept. of English in a Conversation Class through the videoconference system. Prof. Wang said, “If students can respond to foreign teachers directly, it can not only train their listening comprehension but also increase their confidence when they get in touch with foreigners.”

Both Prof. Wang and Prof. Wilkinson are interested in e-learning and both give great applause to these learning resources, and hence, through Prof. Wang’s and her teaching assistant Chen Shih-hui’s (graduate student of Dept of English) coordination with Prof. Wilkinson, they finally decided the time to do the distance learning. The whole project is also the topic of Chen’s master thesis. According to Prof. Wang, one of the goals of this project is to arrange conversations between our students and American students.

UPDATE： 2010/09/27 CLICKS： 1237 DOWNLOADS：